Search

Salience approaches are a widely used theory when studying political behavior on how political party’s emphases certain policy issues more than other issues and therefore, defining certain topics as more important to the party than other policies. One of the most important documents studying policy salience is the election manifestos parties present to the voters, containing intentions and views on issues they want to purse in the coming term. This study’s ambition is to describe two Swedish parties’ saliency, the Social Democrats and the Moderate Party, in the election manifestos between the elections 1985-2014, and examine if the party strives to render a corresponding saliency when proposing motions in different committees, in the deliberative assembly under the same time period in Swedish parliament. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their manifestos emphasis and prioritize policies regarding the space a topic have, specific policies will stress the same or similar themes in the parliament committees. The results show that policy salience in election manifestos has a tendency when predicting parliament motions proposed from the Social Democrats and the Moderate party in the Swedish Parliament.

Ministerial portfolios are the most obvious payoffs for parties entering a governing coalition in parliamentary democracies. This renders the bargaining over portfolios an important phase of the government formation process. The question of 'who gets what, and why?' in terms of ministerial remits has not yet received much attention by coalition or party scholars. This article focuses on this qualitative aspect of portfolio allocation and uses a new comparative dataset to evaluate a number of hypotheses that can be drawn from the literature. The main hypothesis is that parties which, in their election manifestos, emphasise themes corresponding to the policy remit of specific cabinet portfolios are more likely to obtain control over these portfolios. The results show that policy saliency is indeed an important predictor of portfolio allocation in postwar Western European parliamentary democracies.